Connubial Bliss

Manus ( Mott the Hoople ) fumbles this macho farce centering around a not-so-nice Jewish boy from the Bronx who uses Yiddish words and quotes Roman philosophers with equal ease. Lenny Samuels resides on a small Greek island, enjoying an ``open'' second marriage until his wife leaves him to become a porn goddess, making movies for a billionaire artist named Randi Korball (an obviously caricatured Andy Warhol). Lenny returns to New York and grotesqueries follow: Lenny kills his diabetic father to put him out of his misery; Lenny's first wife discovers a handwritten autobiography by a black junkie and becomes both his editor and his lover, while Lenny is hired to do publicity; the book is an instant success, excerpted in Life magazine and adapted for a television documentary. Manus has an excellent eye for descriptive detail, but conveys puerile attitudes about women and particularly about sex: ``There's no breaking the way of things, which for a Jewish boy is to marry a good, sensible Jewish girl for the first wife, then a wild blonde shikseh for the second.'' (July)